A Dude, A Dog and A Dame return

Democracy

Until my mid-teens I bought everything America was selling. I swallowed brand USA with the naivete and fervor of a Trump University sucker.

I watched the westerns with chisel-jawed heroes like Randolph Scott and John Wayne fighting bad guys and blood-thirsty Indians. I idolized actor Audie Murphy who overcame his thespian shortcomings because audiences knew the decorated World War II veteran had the real life chops to play heroes.

Back before the Me Too Movement, I laughed as Bob Hope delivered scantily clad show girls and double entendres to American service men protecting the world from communists in lonely far away outposts.

I looked up to your Presidents. I particularly liked Kennedy, the good Catholic family man whose philandering went unreported, when he faced down the tyrant Khrushchev. In my youthful mind U.S. Presidents represented a country with principles, a country that stood up to tyranny, no matter the cost, to keep us all safe.

The truth is, I wanted to be an American, not a polite Canadian with second rate celebrities, earnest heroes and boring politicians.

Then I grew up. Or at least expanded intellectually.

The illusion of America the Great, did not shatter immediately, smashed upon a sharp rock of reality. It peeled away, layer by layer, as historical truths gleaned from a lifetime of reading and travel began to sink in.

In this era of alternate facts and truth isn’t truth, here are a few myth shattering irrefutable facts easily verified on Google:

The Constitution Americans so revere was formulated by bigoted white men who viewed the concept of liberty through the toilet paper tube view of race. The liberty they envisioned did not include black people who slaved on their plantations, yellow people who died at back breaking labour for meager pay or red people whose lands were usurped in a cultural genocide that would eventually be given the highfalutin name of Manifest Destiny.

The United States is not a true democracy in which the majority rules. Money is the determining factor in getting elected. Lots of money. Even then the Presidential candidate who gets the most votes doesn’t always win, as evidenced by two of the last three Presidents. The Electoral College system was created to appease slave states. It is so complicated and antiquated most Americans could not tell you how it works, or why. The Senate is a smoke and mirrors democratic institution: in choosing a Supreme Court Justice who will determine the country’s direction for decades, a representative from Wyoming who might represent a couple hundred thousand voters carries the exact same weight as a Senator from California who represents 20 million constituents.

The U.S. is not a country in which no man is above the law. As if he were a Medieval monarch, the President retains the absolute power to pardon anyone of any crime, be it friend, family member or accomplice. It is an open question among constitutional scholars whether a President can pardon himself. Enough said.

The United States is not the land of the free. In America, incarcerating its own people is big business. The U.S. imprisons more of its citizens than any country in the world. It’s not even close.

The Supreme Court is not an impartial body above politics. This is a claim stunning in its brazenness, given the disgraceful nominating process the world just witnessed. Justices are appointed by the politicians in charge on the basis of their ideology. Period.

The U.S. is not the greatest country in the world, a place where all the rest of us want to live. It is a country that spends more on its military than the next five countries combined while its infrastructure crumbles and Americans die because they can’t afford health care. Once great cities like Detroit have been reduced to Third World dereliction. Chicago is a war zone. No one wants to move to Flint and drink toxic water or go to Puerto Rico to sit in the dark. It is a scary country whose heavily armed citizens are killing each other in nightclubs and movie theatres, restaurants and parks, churches and schools in record shattering numbers. The majority of the non-desperate world citizens prefer to live in stable countries and many no longer want to visit the States.

The U.S. has never been the shining city on the hill, a beacon of integrity for all the world to see. It is a country that has always put its own interests first regardless of morality. It has pillaged the world’s resources, never putting a dollar into a Third World country without the expectation of getting two out. The feigned indignation expressed by Lindsay Graham at the Saudis for killing a journalist, the same red-faced sputterings he unleashed at the “non-political” Kavanaugh hearings, would make for great satire if the subject matter wasn’t so horrifying. As Graham well knows, the U.S. has a long sordid history of propping up murderous tyrants, from Anastasia Somoza in Nicaragua to the Shah of Iran, from Saddam Hussein to Manual Noriega in Panama, until the latter’s blatant drug dealing became too public. America threw in with corrupt Vietnamese generals while dropping bombs, napalm and Agent Orange on people fighting for the right to determine their own country’s fate. All in the name of their own national interests. Meanwhile Graham’s new BFF is cozying up to the current generation of tyrants, professing love for the North Korean thug who had his half-brother killed in a Singapore airport and returned the broken body of a barely alive U.S. student who pilfered a poster. The hypocritical Graham will no doubt eventually fall in line with U.S. leaders who are blatantly providing a cover story for a repressive tyrant who murdered a U.S.-based journalist then cut up his body.

Perhaps the greatest myth of all is inherent in the country’s name. The United States of America is anything but united. The plain-spoken, politically incorrect fact that nobody on network or cable television wants to say out loud is that the U.S. comprises a society in which a significant portion of its populace has deplorable values. There can be no other explanation for Donald Trump, who is a symptom not the cause of the country’s spiritual sickness. Hillary had it right. Trump supporters are deplorable. They laugh uproariously when their Dear Leader mocks a disabled person or sexual assault victim. They chant “Lock her up!” when he chastises a political opponent and then nod reverently when he tells them accused sexual predators are innocent until proven guilty. Trump supporters are the “very fine people” who marched with tiki torches and killed a woman in Charlottesville. They profess their love of Jesus and family values while supporting a man who cheats on his wife with porn stars, lies pathologically and admits to grabbing women by their private parts, a guy who bullies the weak but barely stops short of oral sex for strongmen like Putin. They cluck when he takes babies and young children from their mother’s arms but take secret comfort in the fact desperate foreigners will soon have to climb over a 30-foot wall to get into the country. They give fealty to a man who drapes himself in the flag but avoided military service when his country called. They say America First but support a tax cheat who always put himself before his country. Deplorable is as deplorable does.

Share this:

Like this:

I lost interest in commenting on American politics about midway through the Mango Megalomaniac’s chaotic first hundred days in office.

Keeping up with the daily deluge of inanities, obfuscations and shameless lies spewing like poisonous gas from the capital of the world’s oldest democracy did not seem a good use of time that could otherwise be devoted to gardening, golf and observing the birds at my backyard feeder.

Who needs the elevated blood pressure and headaches that go with an evening of couch fuming while Trump’s sycophants publicly demean themselves in the service of a self-absorbed, pathological liar, a shallow, philandering, ignoramus who brags about grabbing pussy.

It is blatantly obvious that the man they laud for valuing loyalty would throw any and all of them under the bus and then hunch over the steering wheel and happily drive back and forth over their bloodied corpses if their opinions should ever conflict with his own.

For a former altar boy, watching the good Catholic Paul Ryan grovel at the feet of someone who is anathema to everything his faith professes is to relive the disillusionment of watching Sunday morning hypocrites take the sacred sacrament in known states of mortal sin.

Paul, your sins aren’t forgiven in the confessional if you have no intention of correcting the behaviour when you leave that small, dark, solemn box. Say 10 Hail Marys, button up your big boy cassock and start living the tenets of your faith.

With more than 1,000 days yet to unfold in an administration that tops itself daily with displays of incompetence that have turned the U.S. into the butt of the world’s most dangerous joke, I suffered from a case of early onset Trump Fatigue.

Having repeatedly chastised Trump voters for putting the world in jeopardy by electing a bloviating orange blowhard to the country’s highest office, I watched from the safety of psychological distance as the old, white, Washington swamp creatures slithered in celebration after taking away health coverage from the country’s most vulnerable citizens so the moneyed class can pay less tax.

I wanted to Tweet in all caps so Trump voters would understand: BOTTOM LINE BILLIONAIRES DO NOT HAVE YOUR BEST INTERESTS AT HEART. THESE ARE BAD (SICK) PEOPLE.

I refrained from commenting when Trump experienced an epiphany of biblical political proportions, supposedly after seeing televised images of Syrian kids suffering in the aftermath of a gas attack.

I resisted an urge to state the obvious: Trump, who is self-evidently a world class narcissist and incapable of feeling empathy, used dead children to justify a missile attack that would momentarily deflect attention from the debacle that his presidency has become.

Where was his empathy when rescuers were pulling the bodies of kids from the rubble that remained of Aleppo after his buddy Vladimir Putin sent the Russian bombers to do their murderous work?

He needed a win, and in his demented world of alternative facts, firing missiles at a country that had no missiles to fire back would energize his heavily armed mouth-breathing base. I wanted to put the question to those gun-toting Americans who pride themselves as defenders of freedom: Why is it that the U.S. only utilizes its vaunted military and technological superiority against countries that can’t fight back in kind—Viet Nam, Grenada, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya?

North Korea, which fought the U.S. to a standstill more than six decades ago, has been starving its own people for years; Pakistan harbored Osama Bin Laden and provides sanctuary for terrorists; China could gas everyone in Tibet and not a single U.S. missile would fly.

Message to Trump: A kid is just as dead if his head is crushed by a chunk of concrete.

Oh yeah, the Russians (who were warned to get out of the way of the Syrian missile strike) can shoot back. Not to mention the golden shower video and reams of documentation Putin is holding onto for just the right moment. Pakistan has nukes.

Let’s face it Trump voters, the U.S. is the equivalent of the classic school yard bully, a country that picked its spots during two world wars and continues to beat up on military weaklings while avoiding the real tough guys.

You have put your country in the hands of an ignorant bully, an authoritarian con man who will do anything to avoid accountability, including firing the director of the FBI while that agency is ramping up an investigation into malfeasance which strikes at the core of your democracy.

The word unprecedented has become a cliché since the Mango Megalomaniac took control.

The list of firsts includes dropping the largest bomb ever to be exploded on the planet. It is the only time in your history that a president has fired an FBI director who is investigating people close to the Presidency.

Can the world’s first strategic nuclear strike be far behind?

The list grows longer and the world more dangerous as you sit back smugly on your oversized arses watching sports and reality TV as the systems and institutions you so revere are being dismantled, never missing an opportunity to tell the rest of us that you are the greatest country in the world and that God is on your side.

You listen with docility as your President bullies and denigrates longtime allies under the guise of putting American interests first. News flash: Anyone with even rudimentary knowledge of history knows Americans have always put their own interests first.

You allow your elected representatives to roll out flimsy excuses for inexcusable behaviour as they pay homage to a sick leader while stripping your family of health care. Your hallowed democracy teeters on the brink, while partisan politicians put party loyalty ahead of country.

You have been duped and like most victims of a con are too embarrassed to admit the truth. The only question that remains is how many of your precious freedoms are you willing to give up before you stand up for yourselves and start chanting in one powerful voice–Lock him up.

Share this:

Like this:

Ladies and gentleman of the U.S. you have put a mentally ill man into a position of power over the world’s most lethal military. You have placed the rest of us in grave danger.

The man you chose out of a population of 300-odd million to lead you through these most dangerous of times is exhibiting classic signs of mental breakdown, perhaps being brought on by the reality of the Presidency that cannot be so easily molded by denials, obfuscations and outright lies.

That said, I can no longer make fun of Donald Trump in print by calling him a Mango Megalomaniac, as that would be making fun of the mentally challenged. I will now refer to him by name, but not title, and officially join the conspiracy to delegitimatize his Presidency.

Donald Trump is a narcissist by the classic definition of the illness. Google the Merriam Webster Medical Definition of Narcissism: a personality disorder characterized by an exaggerated sense of self-importance, persistent need for attention, lack of empathy for others. Excessive pride in achievements, and snobbish, disdainful or patronizing attitudes.

Never mind taking Donald Trump’s picture and pasting it beside this definition, these words are his political eulogy. And that is not good for any of us.

During his bizarre stop at CIA headquarters on the day of the record protests, his first official day in office, he appeared a mentally ill man under tremendous stress.

Think about it. There are at least three ongoing investigations with Russian connections. Some ‘400-pound’ computer genius sitting on a bed in a basement somewhere in the vast cyber world is trying to hack into his tax returns or his text messages or post a salacious video that could go viral.

A lot of smart people, motivated by professionalism, patriotism, party politics or revenge, are digging deep into the dirt of his life, including all his ‘alternative’ versions of it.

They are looking for factual facts.

Before taking office he began a public feud with the American intelligence community, going on international television and likening intelligence officials to Nazis in an attempt to delegitimatize future findings and the intelligence community’s credibility going forward.

He then chose to make the CIA his first stop as President. He stood before the cameras, enveloped in the narcissist’s world of ‘alternative facts’, in front of the hallowed wall of fallen American heroes and the people he has so recently denigrated, and claimed there is no better friend of the intelligence community than himself, before launching into a bizarre and disjointed ramble against the media, spouting conspiracy theories about the size of his inauguration crowd.

Are you worried yet people?

A man whose organization and associates are under investigation, not to mention the run of the mill national and world problems that a new President must deal with, is focused on the pettiest of issues, one that equates in the mind of a short-fingered narcissist to saying the first black President is better endowed.

Unable to let the crowd size issue go, he stewed and obsessed, finally sacrificing the credibility of his press secretary by sending him out for his first briefing to read a written list of ‘alternative facts’ that made him appear not only a narcissist’s lackey but a laughing stock.

Unprecedented has become a media cliché. If Donald Trump can unravel over an issue that basically boils down to ‘mine is bigger than yours,’ what unprecedented international actions will he take with Putin pulling his strings and pushing his buttons.

The lack of awareness in a man who made his political bones questioning the legitimacy of Barrack Obama, and is now whingeing and whining about a conspiracy to undermine his own Presidency, shows how far into the world of narcissism he has gone.

Fake intelligence. Fake news. Fake sexual assault claims.

The narcissistic mind whirls within a windstorm of ‘alternative facts’.

Americans? Do you understand what you have done? You ignored all the symptoms and put the planet in jeopardy and now it is up to you to get it undone.

Fortunately, you get a do-over.

As powerful as the office is, there are safeguards through which a mentally ill President can be thwarted. A narcissist cannot operate without the cooperation of Capital Hill. You must put enormous pressure on both parties to put patriotism ahead of politics. You must demand that your representatives in the Senate and House of Congress recognize the dangers associated with this disorder. You must ensure the investigations move forward without interference. Make him release his taxes. Refute his propaganda minister’s ‘alternative facts.’ Make your President live in the real world.

You must be vigilant for your democracy before Donald Trump starts dressing up in a gold-braided hat and military suits with flashy gold epilates and a chest full of medals.